


Salt Shadows

by Twitchiest



Series: Apocalypse Girl [12]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Present Tense, holy shit I get to mention that, mention of biochemical warfare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-05-02
Packaged: 2018-06-05 22:55:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6726709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twitchiest/pseuds/Twitchiest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I didn't do it right," Sitiara says, in the lull of night. "I cursed myself."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salt Shadows

_**One** _

The lake-valley is one of her favourite places. They come here just after the wet season, when the lake water is fresh and alive with young fish, and all the trees have leaves to rustle in the wind. There's so much food she can curl up in the shelter of knotted roots and mother won't come looking for her to help.

As long as she doesn't go where the ground is hard, and cracked, no matter how much rain they have. There's a poison monster there, under the rock. To wake it is to curse the entire family, father says.

_**Two** _

"Why does that curse matter?" she asked him, once. Wide-eyed, twelve years old, sitting at a campfire three days out from the valley.

Mother said, "Don't you mind what's not yours."

"Everything's cursed," she said. "Don't go in here or there. Why does that one get a special warning?"

Father laughed. He said, "Those are places of the old world. The prophet taught that we must avoid them, because they bring us to sin." He rolled his eyes, like he always did, on their own. "That curse will reach out, if it's disturbed, and kill people. That's why it matters."

_**Three** _

She has carved her name into this tree, all curves and angles. Sitiara. Mother says she was named for a star, but there are no stars in the sky called that. Father teaches her when they're alone, so she knows, better than the boys being cuffed for not paying attention.

It's not as if anyone would listen, if she corrected the boys. Or let her into the lessons. They see her silks and don't look any further.

All she sees are idiot boys, and men acting like she's too broken to teach, but that's just fine. Quiet doesn't mean stupid.

_**Four** _

Any other day in the lake-valley, she'd uncurl at sunset and eat dinner, and go to watch the shadow dancing, at the entrance of the caves. Today, she's woken from her doze by father's touch on her arm and his soft, "Sweet Sitiara, how delicately you sleep."

She frowns at him. He's smiling, fond, teasing but not hurting.

"I need your help," he says.

"Women can't help with men things," she points out. This is what they say, in public.

"Ah," father says. "But my rough, manly hands have proven useless. Surely that makes it a task for a woman?"

_**Five** _

Sitiara isn't a woman. She's fifteen. Mother won't let her go, even though she has her eye on someone Sitiara rather likes. Even if he kisses her soft, and acts good enough to her family. Mother doesn't want her to leave.

Still, the other tribe, the one father doesn't like, they call her a woman, and father makes sure she keeps her head covered around them, never lets her out of his sight. She's learned, with them, to keep her eyes down, and stay silent even when her words aren't tangled up in her throat, because they anger so fast.

**_Six_ **

Father leads her across the valley to the caves, in full blazing heat. He steps in like they're not sacred spaces, full of ghosts and monsters. She stops. He looks back.

"Curses and sins," she says. "This one is dangerous."

Father smiles across an arm's width that stretches wide as a flooded river. "Walk where I walk," he says. "You will not be harmed."

Words from his book. Their book. Spoken by a wise man to his followers, and those who trusted, lived.

She nods, and she follows him.

The caves echo strangely under her feet, like a blacksmith's shop.

**_Seven_ **

The lessons the boys get are useless, anyway. Father has been teaching her all the languages they meet, some twelve or so, even though half of them are variations of each other. He shows her the stories, and how the world works, how to build little bridges and choose camping sites. These things are allowed.

The others are secrets, pieces of the world before, and sacred things the prophet said no woman should touch. Sitiara knows the curses that can afflict anyone who believes in them, the hidden words whispered between holy men, the shape of the worlds beyond theirs.

_**Eight** _

The caves twist at right angles, and there are doors to rooms and doors to more caves, and the flickering of dim white lights.

Father taps at squares, always the same ones, at the between doors. It only takes three tries to memorise it. Six squares, a pause, then another seven.

ID6072. PW124A9.

They are a secret, a magic, that makes the doors creak and open. She tucks them away safe and sound in her head, where only she lives.

Father chooses a room-door out of room-doors. It's different from the rest. It's painted red. The magic lets them in.

_**Nine** _

The room is lined with white boxes that hum. The lights do not flicker. There is a glass case in the middle, with strange gloves, and round holes in the side.

Father says, "This is a place of old world curses. I used to work here."

He goes into one of the machines, and he selects three glass tubes. He puts them in the side, stopper-end inwards.

"This was set up for my partner," he says. "A woman. I can't change any of it, not now, so you'll have to do it. And you'll be careful, Siti-sweet. Curses are dangerous."

_**Ten** _

This is the earliest name she knows. Mother used it when she was a baby, she's told, when they were running from men fighting over water and food. She was Siti-sweet before she was Sitiara, before she had nameless nightmares about grey places she doesn't quite remember.

It is good she doesn't. Everyone says so. They say it got bad, and now it's better.

Sitiara only has to glance across at the boys, playing with beads on strings to learn how to balance their deals and count the value of what they have to know that 'better' is a lie.

_**Eleven** _

Father instructs her.

The gloves are a little big for her, cold, clammy, even through the three other pairs of thick blue gloves he makes her put on. She has three syringes, he calls them, each with a thick black line to tell her how much she needs. Their needle-points go through the stoppers. She has to draw some in, careful, then insert it into an empty tube in the back.

They are all clear liquids. They look the same. Father knows them, though, and corrects her.

This is an old, forbidden magic. Her hands tremble, but not from fear.

_**Twelve** _

"I didn't want to work in curses," father tells her, later. Nights later. "It's not a good thing, sweet."

"Curses are power," she says.

"Yes. Power can be taken and used against you."

She nods.

"The curse that ended the world was fire," he says. "Do you remember the missiles, sweet? My work was only used once. We refused. The army rounded us all up in a room to kill us for disobeying, but they missed me. I cursed the air they breathed. Everyone died. Even my friends."

"So the curses didn't escape," she says.

He ruffles her hair. "Yes."

_**Thirteen** _

When she's done mixing, the glass box starts humming, too. She wants to watch, but father makes her go into a room next door and stand in a glass box that sprays her, all over, in a fine, bad-tasting mist. She doesn't like it. It seems to last forever, and her silks are dotted all over like she was caught in rain.

She feels a little better when he has to do it, too. He pulls faces at her.

The glass box isn't humming anymore by the time they're done, and a single glass tube sticks out of the top.

_**Fourteen** _

Sitiara tolerates her wide, loving family's teasing for playing by the lake with father, and getting her silks wet. She smiles and ducks their hands and gestures rude things when mother isn't looking.

Father plays along, but he doesn't do it very well.

When she glances across at him, she remembers his face when he picked up the tube. His curse. The set of his jaw, the darkness that flickered across warm, loving features, the flare of his nose in disgust, but not at her.

She doesn't eat very much at all. She can't hold right. Her hands keep shaking.

**Fifteen**

"I didn't do it right," she says, in the lull of night. "I cursed myself."

Father tips her chin up and studies her eyes in firelight. "This curse shows here," he tells her. "The blood vessels I told you about? They show more. That happens in the first four to six hours." His voice is distant. Cool. "Then the headaches start, and... other things." He softens. "You're fine, Siti-sweet. You did a good job. Thank you."

She bites her lip, something she can't quite name choking her words, and hugs him.

"We're fine," he says, and she hears a lie.

_**Sixteen** _

They stay in the lake-valley a month and then move on, east. Sitiara knows it's coming, so when father tells her to stay back with mother whilst he goes to trade with the other tribe alone, their trusted trader, she can't get any words past her fear and has to settle for hugging him, tight, head buried against his jacket.

"I love you, Siti-sweet," he tells her, and ruffles her hair. "Look after everyone, now."

She steals his book away from his things and hugs it all night, and no one dares to take it away from her. Not this.

**Seventeen**

Father is dead.

Sitiara looks at a body wrapped in black, looks at men who apologise for not being fast enough to protect him from the wolves when wolves only attack people in nightmare stories. Sitiara looks at the men and their swords and thinks about her father's face when he picked up a little glass tube. Sitiara looks at their wary, red-veined eyes, and in her mind she sees the world that was, could be, must never be.

That night, Siti begins to persuade her soft-kissing boy that they must leave.

(Oh, but if she'd chosen a better boy-)

 


End file.
